Life is full of crazy moments, ups and downs and mixed up plans. My life changed in September 2008 when my fiancé was killed in Iraq. Nothing like what I planned, I continued forward. Support from friends and family, as well as my inner strength kept me moving. Now married and raising a pup, I am taking life one moment at a time, living in the present, and working to be happier every day.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

From "A Grief Observed" by C.S. Lewis

I have read through this book twice in about a week. It is very short, just a collection of essays about his feelings after losing his wife. I seem to be writing a lot a lately but not necessarily things I want to "publish" in this format. So here you go...

Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. Forvarious reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter thanit had been for many weeks. For one thing, I suppose I am recovering physicallyfrom a good deal of mere exhaustion. And I'd had a very tiring but very healthytwelve hours the day before, and a sounder night's sleep; and after ten days oflow-hung grey skies and motionless warm dampness, the sun was shining and therewas a light breeze. And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H.least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better thanmemory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meetingwould be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use thosewords. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier.

Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation. I might have said, ‘He's got over it. He's forgotten his wife', whenthe truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.'

...Looking back, I see that only a very little time ago I was greatly concernedabout my memory of H. and how false it might become. For some reason - themerciful good sense of God is the only one I can think of - I have stoppedbothering about that. And the remarkable thing is that since I stopped botheringabout it, she seems to meet me everywhere. Meet is far too strong a word. Idon't mean anything remotely like an apparition or a voice. I don't mean evenany strikingly emotional experience at any particular moment. Rather, a sort ofunobtrusive but massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to betaken into account.~C. S. Lewis